¿What are Cyber-Attacks?

When we talk about Cyber-Attacks we reference to offensive actions made in multiple ways by independent people or organized groups with the sole objective of taking down a series of Information systems such as digital infrastructure, computing networks, databases stored in remote servers, through vandalic actions which are generally carried out by anonymous forces as they subtract, decompose or ruin a specific target making use of a maneuver known as Hacking a system that is often vulnerable.

Cyber-Attacks may target computers or computing systems connected to the world wide network, they can also, be directed towards subtracting information and data backed up in a database. When the target happens to be computers or systems, it is often to suppress the services provided by them, may that be in just temporal, or permanently using different strange methods and elements known as “viruses” which impede the proper working of them. As when it is about Cyber-attacks against data, generally this is stolen for military or commercial usage.

Nowadays there is no bulletproof method that allows us to protect our computer effectively against these Cyber-Attacks, although there are certainly ways to make the attackers’ job a bit more difficult.

All of this because in current days we behave as a society immersed and relying entirely on technology, thus exposing our sensible information to potential cyber-attacks.

One of the most accessible areas for attackers are social networks, as people usually tend to feel more comfortable sharing their personal information freely without considering the fact that a total stranger can get so easy access to it.

However, Cyber-Attacks not only affect society, since internet’s early ages, multiple multinational companies have been the target of constant Cyber-Attacks, which in some cases represented major damage to them.

Tips to Avoid Cyber-Attacks:

1.- Make a Backup

It’s should be very important to create a backup of all of our information, or at least the irreplaceable one, thus when suffering a Cyber-Attack our information will not be lost. Making a backup takes time, but on the long run, it could be very useful.

2.- Use Strong Passwords

For absolutely no reason should we make use of our pet’s name as our password, neither the name of one of our children, birthday dates, ID numbers, and such. It’s necessary or at least highly recommendable to build our passwords using a combination of uppercase letters, lowercase letter, numbers and special characters as symbols, which without a doubt will rise our protection level.

3.- Corroborate link and profiles’ Authenticity

It’s very common for internet users to be a victim of these Cyber-Attacks using a method called Phishing which is no more than getting confidential information via deceit, many times by giving or using a fake e-mail address. Furthermore, in current times, in social networks you may find a big number generally used for getting that kind of information, usually trough non authorized and non-official profiles from famous trademarks, so they are able to scam.

4.- Make use of the proper security protocols

Using this kind of tools, it’s highly needed thus with it we can avoid file transfer to a server. It’s also very important to use them, even more if we regularly give or access data and information via unknown sources of using low trust websites.

Strongest Cyber-Attacks in the past year

Cyber-Attack to USA’s government

This one was an attack which affected in a big way the United States’ core administration, making it one of the worst Cyber-attacks in history. This attack consisted of an Information steal of 21,5 million people of this nation. Then were their passwords exposed, usernames, social healthcare numbers, and such. Not much time went by for finding this attack’s responsible, knowing that it’s origin was of a Chinese nature and their objective was to get Chinese citizens living in the United States.

The ‘Hacking Team’ hack

This was a curious one since it was a Hacker to Hacker kind of attack- Hacking Team is a renown Italian software firm, that works in the line of providing legally tools for Espionage and remote access as Spyware or malware, and lay their services to governments and intelligence agencies. For that kind of matter, they were hacked and turned into the victims of a Cyber-Attack where the Hackers got up to 500GB of stolen confidential data.